Many applications exist where there is a need to accurately dispense fixed volumes or weights of fluid into a range of vessels. For example, in the catering and hospitality industries, accurately dispensing pre-determined portions of fluid product on demand can be of significant importance when repetitively preparing food and beverages. Within these industries, such dispensing mechanisms must remain as clean and hygienic as possible, particularly to meet certain regulatory requirements. Furthermore, in order to sustain a profitable business it is also important to avoid unnecessary wastage of food and beverage products and to dispense the portions as efficiently as possible.
Although prior art dispensing systems are available which perform adequately, improvements could be made in relation to the speed at which such systems operate. Improvements could also be made in the overall cleanliness and maintenance of such systems, in addition to the usability and convenience of operation inherent in such prior art.
For example with respect to the food industry, it is known to provide a hand pumped sauce dispenser on a tabletop which can be used by either kitchen staff or patrons directly. These hand pump dispensers simply hold a reservoir of sauce which can dispense a regular or repeatable volume of sauce on one full depression of the pumps drive lever. However, such dispensers suffer from hygiene and cleanliness issues and must be emptied and cleaned out regularly. It is also possible to over fill a vessel presented to a hand pump dispenser if the vessel is not capable of receiving the entire standard dose of sauce supplied by single actuation of the pump.
When the fluid to be dispensed is formed by pellets or powders a significant amount of handling work is required of kitchen staff. Staff must measure out required weights or volumes from bulk packaging stores, or need to individually open packaging used to protect single dose or single serve of fluid material. These approaches are relatively slow in operation and require a great deal of labour. Furthermore, single-dose packages have a higher environmental packaging cost, creating unnecessary amounts of waste material.
In café environments there is a need for baristas to regularly pour fixed volumes of refrigerated milk into vessels to be used in the preparation of beverages. Typically a milk container is manually removed by a barista from a refrigerator and the required volume of milk poured into a vessel, the vessel often having different dimensions according to the type of beverage being prepared. This approach makes it difficult to dispense fixed volumes of milk repeatedly and quickly and often clutters the baristas working surfaces. This approach also creates unnecessary wastage due to the packaging of the many milk containers which will be used in a day.
A number of past attempts have been made to resolve some of these issues by providing automated fluid dispensers. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,236,553 entitled “Beverage portion controller”, in the name of Arthur Reichenberger, discloses an automated beverage dispensing system which dispenses liquid according to vessel capacity due to a probe being lifted vertically by the lip of a cup presented to the dispenser and dispensing the pre-determined volume of beverage according to the vertical displacement of the probe by the height of the cup. However, the apparatus is not only inconvenient and un-intuitive to use but also suffers from the drawback of increasing the chance of a user spilling a filled cup, particularly when being frequently operated such as in a busy café or fast food outlet. For example, when filling a cup with beverage a user must initially tilt the cup to hook the lip of the cup under the probe and lift the probe to activate the system, proving awkward. Once the cup has then had beverage dispensed into it, the filled cup is trapped between the probe and the base of the dispenser, by the probe exerting a force downwards on the lip of the cup. This would prove inconvenient to remove the cup and is likely to increase the chance of the filled cup being spilt due to the force of the probe on the lip and the likelihood that a cup would be tilted or knocked over during removal from the apparatus. Furthermore the hook of the probe on the lip of the cup would prove unhygienic, transmitting residue between cups presented to the apparatus, particularly when dispensing liquids such as milk.
Accordingly it would be useful to provide a fluid dispensing system that dispenses a portion of fluid according to the capacity of a vessel presented to the system which is intuitive and convenient to use and does not increase the risk of a user spilling the vessel's contents once filled. It would be advantageous to provide a dispensing apparatus that may be used reliably, frequently and dispenses at high speed, which minimizes wastage of dispensed product and packaging of the dispensed product. It would also be of advantage to provide a system that is hygienic and does not transfer dispensed product residue between vessels.
Accordingly, it would be useful to provide a solution that avoids or alleviates any of the disadvantages present in the prior art, or which provides an alternative to the prior art approaches.